Thursday, February 9, 2017

General Gamery: Superhuman RPG

Does this mean that I'm not going to continue working on the Superhuman Miniatures Game that was promised forever ago?

No. Not at all. Actually, it's kind of the opposite.

Miniatures are expensive to make. I mean really, really expensive. Especially in the scope that Superhuman requires. But art for the game, I already have in abundance. Not to mention setting.

Oh sure, I'd been tossing around the idea of making a FATE Superhuman RPG... but then I realized something far better designers than me figured out a few years ago. SYNERGY!!!

For the last few years I've been loving the Iron Kingdoms RPG- partially because I adore Immoren as a world. But more than anything else it's that the wizards over at Privateer Press figured out that the same people that roleplay in Iron Kingdoms might also play Warmachine or Hordes. And that making the rules for one work with the others might benefit all three games.

And so that's what I'll do here.

The Superhuman RPG (oh, I should toss up the logo for it, huh?) will use the art I've compiled for the minis game over the years from the likes of Avery Liell-Kok, Bryan Bretz, and Matt Parmenter, build the world, and utilize the entire ruleset for Superhuman with some tweaks and add-ons to give it depth.

Then, whenever it is possible to fund a project like Superhuman Miniatures, we can broaden the scope to change the focus to small teams of supers, rather than individuals like in the RPG.

Sounds simple, right?

Well, it's not. Retooling Superhuman for RPG means digging deep and revisiting all the mistakes I made in the earlier versions of the game. In the decade or so since I first conceived of Superhuman, I've changed and grown as a game designer so much that earlier drafts are pretty much unreadable. Basically it's more difficult to retool than start over.

But no, starting over isn't really the right way. The core of Superhuman was pretty good and I can build from the basic mechanics to something grand on multiple levels.

And I'll want you to help me with it.

We start this summer with Gencon 50.

At Gencon, I will be running a single event for Superhuman on Saturday at 1pm. Players in this event will play the villains in a Bank Heist- the first in The Crew, a line of convention exclusive adventures that longtime readers will remember from my early steps in this blog.

If I do this right, every player will walk away with a copy of the introductory adventure complete with pregenerated PCs and all the rules you would need to run it. From there, we'll start playtests so that Gencon 2018 can see a full release of the book.

Secret Identity

Dr. Mono, The Joeman, or "Self" as he calls himself, spends his idle time writing words on a device called a computer. Sometimes these words are for actual projects. Sometimes he puts words to screen for blogs no one reads. And sometimes he's playing Tetris. It varies.
As a freelance writer, he’s worked on the Smallville Roleplaying Game, Marvel Heroic Roleplaying - Civil War: X-men, Marvel Heroic Roleplaying - Annihilation, the Red Dragon Inn Adventure Series: Appetizer, and many others.